Lance Sells Archives - Robot 6 @ Comic Book Resources

This is our final post for our big birthday bash, and what a post it is. No matter how much stuff we line up, people we interview, etc., there are still tons of folks we like to hear from and include in our giant New Year’s/anniversary/birthday activities. So, as we have in past years, we have asked various comics folks what they are excited about for 2012 in comics–something they aren’t working on and something they are.

There’s a lot of great stuff here–hints at new projects and even some downright announcements. Our thanks to everyone this year who responded!

Jason Latour

Loose Ends 4

I’m most anticipating the 30th Anniversary of HEROES CON (June 22-24, Charlotte, NC) . For any convention 30 years is an amazing run, but the fact that Shelton Drum and his extended family have put this show together every year with nothing but blood, sweat and tears is flat out super heroic.

On the personal front, the challenging and exhilarating ride that’s been Loose Ends will come to a close with issue 4. It’ll be bittersweet to send our child off to into the real world but I can’t wait for you guys to see the work Brunner & Renzi are doing.

I’m also super excited to dip my own toes into the Mignola-verse with the BPRD: The Pickens County Horror [March 28, 2012] and to read the end of Jason Aaron & RM Guera’s Scalped, which is my favorite series in years.

Jason Latour is a writer/artist, most recently the writer of Loose Ends. He spoke with Tim O’Shea about the miniseries in July.

Patrick Zircher

This sounds politic, but it’s genuine: what excites me about comics in 2012 is what’s exciting every year, the work of the talent. Seeing what the best are up to and how the up-n-comers have grown as artists and writers. In the new year, I’m also excited about illustrating several books and covers that feature my favorite Avengers.

Patrick Zircher is an artist, who explored the 1920s/1930s era of the Marvel universe in 2011 with the five-issue miniseries, Mystery Men. He spoke with Tim O’Shea about the miniseries in May.

Social media and e-commerce is ever-evolving as all of us can easily attest. In the past month or so, I became aware of Thwipster, an online enterprise with the slogan “Daily Deals for your Inner Geek.” The enterprise describes itself as follows: “At the core of Thwipster is a daily deal website that offers a little bit of everything for the person who loves their geek culture. Simply put, it is the daily deal site for your inner geek. We are striving to make Thwipster a destination that will make your quest to score the world’s finest graphic novels, toys, games and assorted geek culture items a more rewarding experience in a multitude of ways. We are also taking a very hands on approach to the selection of the materials we sell, so you can trust us to provide only the highest quality geek culture related items.” To better grasp the game plan for Thwipster, I recently caught up with Lance Sells, co-founder and director of Thwipster. In addition to discussing Thwipster, we also delve into his work in motion graphic novels (via Motherland).

Tim O’Shea: How did you initially conceive of Thwipster and how long was it in development before it launched?

Lance Sells: My brother Chad and I would talk on the phone and he would consistently bring up his thoughts about opening a comic store down in his area. He’s someone that goes to his local comic shop to hang out and talk where I’m someone who orders mainly online and have a pretty big interest in startups and technology. So from there we merged our interests, buying habits and tastes and came up with this idea to do a Daily Deal for geek stuff with a strong focus on graphic novels. As far as development time it was pretty fast from concept to launch. We talked mid-February and launched late April so it was about 10 weeks from idea to fruition.